Herbicides and Pesticides

Synthetic herbicides and pesticides are widely used globally and we are only starting to understand and clearly see the many detrimental effects they can have.

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The most widely used herbicide in the world, Glyphosate, is now listed as a likely human carcinogen by the World Health Organisation. The reason the "likely" is there is because it has been proven to cause cancer in lab animals and there is still data to be collected on humans - although, now there has been a court case won against the manufacturer of the product Roundup, which has Glyphosate as its active ingredient, finding it to have caused cancer in a groundskeeper who used it. Glyphosate is present in many conventional (i.e. non-organic) food products. One of the worst is oats - when oat crops are treated with Glyphosate they seem to retain huge amounts of it. See the bottom of the page for a link to the Institute for Responsible Technology's database of the amount of Glyphosate found in different foods.

While it is mostly sold as a herbicide, Glyphosate was originally developed as a chelator to clean pipes of the build-up of minerals within them, meaning it binds to mineral, makes them unavailable, and moves them out of the system - plumbing systems, and our own human systems. It binds to magnesium, zinc, potassium, selenium, and manganese, essential minerals that our bodies need to function properly. Magnesium and zinc alone activate more than 200 enzymes in our bodies. It can also bind to minerals in the soil, and when they aren't in the soil, they don't make it into the foods grown in that soil. When testing Glyphosate treated crops vs those not treated with Glyphosate, the levels of essential minerals is incredibly low.

Soil Minerals samples - Glyphosate treated vs non-Glyphosate treated (ppm):

  • Phosphorus 3 vs. 44

  • Potassium 7 vs. 113

  • Calcium 14 vs. 613

  • Magnesium 2 vs. 113

  • Manganese 2 vs 14


So not only is the food we're eating much lower in essential minerals because it has been treated with Glyphosate, but the Glyphosate getting into our system also binds with what few minerals are left and makes them unavailable for the body to use.


Other potential detrimental effects of Glyphosate:

  • Fatty Liver Disease – it has been proven to cause this

  • Low sperm motility

  • Higher miscarriage rate among farmers who use it

  • It is also a patented anti-biotic which means it kills, and unfortunately appears to preferentially kill, the beneficial bacteria in our gut. For example, we have a bacteria in our gut that usually keeps Clostriudium Botchiltum under control. This bacteria is easily killed by Glyphosate.

  • The commencement of wide-spread Glyphosate use tightly correlates with increased incidence of Autism, Cancers, Coeliac Disease and many other conditions.

  • Heavy metal toxicity - arsenic, cadmium, nickel, and petroleum residues are also found in Round-up


Glyphosate isn’t the only dangerous herbicide or pesticide out there. Exposure to pesticides generally has been shown to increases risk of Parkinson’s Disease according to the Journal of Neurotoxicology. There are many pesticides that are known endocrine disruptors, meaning they mess with hormones. For instance, the Pesticide Atrazine turns male frogs female and may affect male human foetus genital formation. There is a long list of detrimental effects of synthetic herbicides and pesticides and we are best to avoid them.

Related Articles:

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs)

Further Information:

Institute for Responsible Technology - responsibletechnology.org who also have a database for searching how much Glyphosate is in different foods: http://irt-glyphosatepage.flywheelsites.com/


Much Love,

Sophia Englezos